An Accommodating Bible

Across the five years that I have been writing these columns, two rules for interpreting the Christian faith sensibly have been especially important to me. One calls for acknowledging and respecting the sometimes very wide differences between the apostolic age and the present-day, and the adjustments that we must make to the fact that, in James Russell Lowell's words, time can make ancient good "uncouth." The other calls for assessing carefully the accommodations that must be made in order to transmit convincingly a saving message generated in one era and culture to people in other eras and cultures with vastly different mind-sets. Contrary to those who think that the Bible is undefiled by such, the Scriptures actually contain some of the most flagrant examples of accommodation at its best and at its worst. What follows looks more to the worst; the best are yet to come.

This Spring, preparing some new material for a World Religions course I was teaching, I found myself struggling anew to work out a coherent account of ancient Israel's transition from tribal confederations to a full-blown monarchy, and to make sense out of a number of so-called historical texts that in today's world surely are better forgotten. One set gleefully pictured God riding roughshod over the property rights of the Canaanites and the Philistines. If today's Arab-Israeli conflicts are any indication, the tribal deity invoked by both sides still delights in fomenting this kind of uproar, and the cost of catering to his whim has simply become too great for the rest of us to bear.

And then there is 2 Samuel 22, prefaced in the Revised English Bible this way: "These are the words of the song David sang to the Lord on the day when the Lord delivered him from the power of all his enemies and from the power of Saul." (Psalm 18 repeats the word with few variations.) The deliverance was really something: the whole earth shook from God's anger; smoke poured out of God's nostrils, and fire from his mouth; he swooped down from heaven, darkened everything, and pummeled his enemies with arrows of lightning, hail, and even burning coals. Why? For one reason, he had really gotten into the monarchy thing, at first with Saul, who initially wanted no part of it --- wisely, as it turned out. But here, there is another reason: the Lord rescued David because he "delighted" in him, repaying David as his "righteousness" deserved. (vss.20, 21)

Discussions with several of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim students to whom I introduced this material brought me to a new appreciation of just how "uncouth" the idea is of a God who will set our leaders' feet on our enemies' necks and wipe out those who hate us. (vs. 40) What did it was my horrified discovery that each was worshipping this very God, under different religious banners, and that I may have unwittingly supplied all of them with still another "holy" justification for expecting the destruction of their own enemies as the just desserts of being loyal practitioners of their respective faiths.

As if its accommodation to the need of an enslaved people for a God stronger than Babylon's were not enough, the text also offers succor in the face of the obvious fact that Israel and Judah proved to be no match for the rulers of Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, and Rome as well, except for --- are you ready for this?--- in the superior righteousness of King David himself. Huh? The cloyingly self-congratulatory king of this text is now the model of righteousness for everyone else, kings and emporers included? Hardly. The song here attributed to him bends the truth about God and his expectations of us at about the angle that the real David must have bent Bathsheba, after seeing to it of course that Uriah would not be around to complain, ever. (And whatever Bathsheba's own complaints may have been about it apparently did not count at all.)

Sometimes, biblical faith can accommodate itself to changing circumstances by means of relatively easy tasks like getting its own history reconsidered and even rewritten. Other times, the accommodation may require nothing less than the incorporation of a wholly new world-view. The writer of Ephesians seems to have had something like the latter in mind when he situated the true enemies of God on a different plane altogether from that of earthly battlefields. Our struggle, he wrote, "is not against human foes, but against cosmic powers…the superhuman forces of evil in the heavenly realms." (6:12) Or just maybe it is against the evil that is in our own hearts. The willingness to confront all the "maybes" in the Bible, and the different accommodations that incorporate them, is what interpreting the Christian faith sensibly is all about.